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Our star, published author would be the one for that little task, I suggest he gets his "little grey cells" to work...









Anyway, over at my blog "Cover Me!" I was spotlighting a REH book today, so I thought I might as well import it to this thread too. It's the $12.00 1973 The Sowers of Thunder collection from Donald M. Grant, Publisher, illustrated by Roy Krenkel. I see my copy is actually signed by the artist on the title page, but I don’t know if they all were!

“Somber… heroic… masterful. Four grim tales of savagery written by Robert E. Howard for Oriental Stories and Magic Carpet, fabled and near-forgotten companion magazines in the 1930′s to the kingly Weird Tales.

“Here are four episodes out of the East: ‘The Lion of Tiberias,’ ‘The Sowers of the Thunder,’ ‘Lord of Samarkand,’ and ‘The Shadow of the Vulture.’ They are chronicles of a shadow period in which individual deeds have been lost sight of in the magnitude of a whole era of massive battles and wars, until dredged out of time by the stark imagination – or perhaps formed in the ancestral memory (who can say different after once reading these stories?) – of Robert E. Howard.

“That which is closest to the real Robert E. Howard can be found in these bold, vivid, tragic – monstrously tragic – pages. Read of the empty prize of kingship, the burden of duty, the intrigues, the treacheries, the futility of man’s dreams! And battle ferocity beyond belief.

“Artist Roy G. Krenkel has studied these tales for a period of seven years in order to capture their genius in illustration. The result is a collection of one hundred designs, devices, and illustrations which we believe are the most remarkable series of artwork in recent years. Here is a ‘wedding’ of author and artist in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs and J. Allen St. John, of A. Merritt and Virgil Finlay.

“Mr. Krenkel believes that the ‘very essence of Robert E. Howard in his most stark and tragic vein’ is to be found in this volume.”

Looking through the 285 pages, most double-spreads do feature at least one small illustration, and there are some fine full-page pieces of Krenkel art as well, not to mention the cover and a full-colour frontispiece. There’s an introduction by Krenkel too. In the order mentioned, the novelettes come from the July 1933 The Magic Carpet Magazine, the Winter 1932 Oriental Stories, the Spring 1932 Oriental Stories, and the January 1934 The Magic Carpet Magazine. Both those magazines, with one succeeding the other, were, like Weird Tales, edited by Farnsworth Wright. It’s strange to think that the stories were roughly forty years old when they were rescued for this volume – and The Sowers of Thunder is now almost that old! We’ve quoted the front cover dust-jacket flap above, let’s finish with the back cover description.

“Here, through the mists of time, told as only Robert E. Howard could tell a story, are fleeting glimpses of marching men in grim armor, of battlements stormed by savage hordes, of whispered intrigues in tapestried candlelight. Heroic and somber are these tales, wherein Howard is represented in his darkest mood.”